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You understand it correctly!

Do the companies the journalists work for agree with this model?

We do not ask for prior permission. Our policy is that these companies (publishers) can claim all the money from the articles in their publication read on Readup. We still keep the public accounting on a writer-basis however. Adding information about the earnings of publishers is something we may add soon.

No, we have not received any C&Ds so far.

EDIT: Check Bill's more elaborate response!

Lastly, but I think most importantly - it sounds like you're re-inventing RSS. That only works if the publisher is willing to produce content in that form. Do you expect 100% committment / involvement from all the publishers to your platform?

Readup already works with articles on the whole public internet because we have patented, website-agnostic, article detection technology. Content does not need to be available in RSS. We parse HTML pages locally on your device.

It might help you to understand that for now, all articles are crowd-sourced. Our enthusiastic readers save articles from the web to the app (like in Pocket), then read it in the app. That's the way new content enters. It works a bit like Reddit/Hacker News too.

You say "this article from the atlantic is completely ad free" - that implies you have a partnership with The Atlantic to provide the content to Readup clean (with no ads). Is this the case?

No. Our app strips the ads from the article, like an ad-blocking browser.

I note that you pay out to the publisher?

Correct. It's simple when the writer and publisher are one and the same (bloggers, for example), but our policy is that the publisher can claim the money from the articles on their site.

I read very fast, and skim articles rapidly, rarely reading an article word for word start to finish. How will this impact monetization and tracking?

For now, payouts are all or nothing. Either you read (not skim) 90% of the article and it gets paid, or not. We have % indicator that shows where you are. The tracker is generous and allows for fast reading, but if you're really skimming and quickly scrolling, it won't pick that up. That's how we defeat clickbait. Readup wants to incentivize calm, focused reading of articles that you want to finish. There is certainly information that you would reasonably skim (technical documentation for example), but that isn't really Readup's "target content". This might change if we find a way to stay true to our mission while allow partial reads...

This appears to be ONLY an app. I do 99% of my article reading on my computer. I assume you'll have some sort of web interface for this? How will that wrk with focus time and tracking?

We have desktop apps for your computer too: https://readup.com/download. You can save & open articles from the web in one click with our browser extensions.

Yes! It allows us to do 2 things:
1. Restrict comment sections to people who have fully read an article. This has proven to be a very effective moderation mechanism.
2. Kill clickbait & power a transparent recommendation engine. If Readup says: "20 reads", that means 20 humans fully read that article. That's much better info to evaluate whether an article is good than "200 views", which may have been a result of clickbait.
We only collect reading data to improve your reading. We're very transparent about which exact data we collect, and why, in our detailed (revolutionary?) Privacy Policy.

165+ million paying Spotify subscribers.